Gregory Sale (born 1961) is a socially engaged, multidisciplinary artist, educator, and advocate. Collaborating with individuals and communities on aesthetic responses to social challenges, Sale creates and coordinates large-scale and often long-term public projects that are organized around collective experiences. Participants become creative co-producers focused on collective artistic experiences that identify, address, and transform lives. With the commitment of a wide range of constituencies and institutions, his creative practice includes projects with primary partners in activist circles, social service agencies, non-profit organizations, and government. His most prominent and continuing projects focus on issues of mass incarceration, illuminating the complexities of justice, democracy, and how we practice care as a society.
Based in Phoenix and Los Angeles, Sale is an Associate Professor of Expanded Arts and Public Practice, School of Art, Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts, Arizona State University.
Education
Sale received an MFA at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona in 1995. In 1987 he received a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in French Literature from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
Career
Sale is an Associate Professor of Expanded Arts and Public Practice, School of Art, Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts, Arizona State University. Sale began teaching in the School of Art Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Intermedia in 2007. He became an Assistant Professor of Intermedia and Public Practice in 2011, and in 2017 he was promoted to Associate Professor.
From 2000-2007, Sale served as the Visual Arts Director for the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
From 1997-2000 he served as the Curator of Education at the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe, AZ. From 1996-2000, Sale served as the Public Art Project Manager for the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture in Phoenix, AZ.
His work has been supported by Creative Capital, Art Matters, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Grant, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and A Blade of Grass/David Rockefeller Fund Fellowship in Criminal Justice.
Notable works
As a socially-engaged artist, Sale brings together often opposed constituencies of the criminal justice system from incarcerated men and women, to survivors/victims and their families, to correctional officers and elected officials, to community members, media, and activists. He has developed partnerships with stakeholders spanning political positions from the far right – Joe Arpaio – to the far left – Angela Davis. His aim is to soften and collapse boundaries, thereby encouraging reciprocal dialogue and mutual learning. A somewhat quieter but no less political component of his work flirts with the fluid parameters of public and private love. Selected projects are listed below. For a full list of his projects, refer to his website.
Future IDs At Alcatraz (2018–19)
A yearlong, socially engaged art project, exhibition, and series of community programs at the infamous prison-turned-national park in San Francisco Bay began with a goal of translating criminal justice reform efforts into an artistic language capable of reframing the narrative of reentry after incarceration. As lead artist and project director, Sale worked with core project collaborators Dr. Luis Garcia, Kirn Kim, Sabrina Reid, and Jessica Tully to partner with the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. They co-produced an exhibition that featured mural-sized, self-portraits made by justice-involved individuals, representing their stories of transformation and, importantly, self-determination. The exhibition also acted as a conceptual frame and container for the programmatic series, co-created with more than 20 partner organizations. Together, the exhibition and the programmatic series created an evolving civic space for open dialogue and stories of trauma, transformation, and resilience.